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226 8 CABALLITO A m b e r e s F . S a r m i e n t o Antezana Aranguren J. F. Arengreen B r u n C o lp a y o Av. Díaz Vélez Franklin Gral. M. de Gainza Av. A. Gallardo Gandhi Av. Gaona Apolinario Figueroa L. Viale Galicia Tres Arroyos Planes A v . d r . H . P u e y r r e d ó n P u jo l C u c h a C u c h a D r. N . R e p e tt o R o ja s V . V i r a s o r o E s p in o s a P a y s a n d ú Vallese, F. Av. San Martin 169 The house located at 943 Franklin Street, which operated as a Clandestine Detention Center during the dictatorship, looks dazzling today , renovated and freshly painted . Sergio Bufano, detained in this house in July 1976, remembers it instead as “an old, dilapidated house” [AO .0067] . Little is known about this house that once operated as a detention and torture center surrounded by family homes in the middle of a middleclass neighborhood, because no other survivors have left testimonies . Bufano was kidnapped along with Guillermina Santamaría Woods, a fellow activist from the Communist Organization for Workers’ Power (OCPO, Organización Comunista Poder Obrero ) . The Special Task Group* that kidnapped them acted in broad daylight, exercising the public impunity that served to spread terror throughout the society as a whole . Though Sergio Bufano managed to escape, Guillermina Santamaría Woods remains disappeared . Nicknamed Lotti, she was a teacher and a psychology student at the University of Buenos Aires; she was also pregnant . The escape Bufano took advantage of a moment when he was left alone and managed to escape from his captors a few hours after his kidnapping . The house may have been abandoned as a detention center after this escape, which would account for the lack of information about other survivors . For Pilar Calveiro, physical escape exists on a continuum with many other methods used by prisoners to resist their conditions of detention: “There were many ways to escape the apparatus of the concentration camp besides physical escape” (Calveiro, 169 . House on Franklin Street LOCATION: FRANKLIN 943 TRANSPORTATION: BUSES: 24, 52, 57, 76, 92, 99, 105, 110, 124, 135, 146. 227 1998) . All were rooted in a refusal to follow the detention center’s rules and in an assertion of the detainee’s individual identity . Prisoners used these resistance methods to preserve their dignity, undermine discipline, and transgress the camps’ rules, thereby sabotaging the logic and operation of the bureaucratic machinery . Prisoners used laughter to assert their humanity; they deceived their captors and conspired with other detainees in order to rebuild the bonds of solidarity and ease their sense of extreme isolation . They even committed suicide, taking away the repressive forces’ power to decide on life and death . All these were forms of resistance, ways of “escaping” the logic and goals behind the concentration camps’ power . Other prisoners besides Sergio Bufano managed to escape physically (see “Automotores Orletti, ” p . 220) . Some seized on a momentary opportunity and decided to escape in spite of the intense security in the camps and their own limited and fragmented information about where they were being held . One of the biggest such escapes took place at the detention center known as the Seré Mansion* in the suburban municipality of Morón, in the province of Buenos Aires . Claudio Tamburrini, Guillermo Fernández, Carlos García, and Daniel Rusomano escaped, completely naked, by overcoming the camp’s own psychological mechanisms . They stopped seeing their situation as completely hopeless . Instead , they exploited any flaw in the detention center’s operation to gather every shred of information that could help them break the barrier of isolation and suspicion and rebuild the bonds of solidarity with their fellow prisoners . ...

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